Hello, world

OMG - It works!

Welcome to Tiny Systems On a Chip Computer
Science,

aka. http://www.tinysoccs.com

September 25, 2013

Dear Interested and Technically Inclined Person,

This is the default Apache web page of the first Tiny SOC CS
server. The correct pronunciation is "tiny soccs", which sounds very
much like "tiny socks". I wanted a name that might be humorously
memorable. Most people think this does it. Just conjure up the
image of a pair of "tiny socks" and replace the "k" with a "c".

The name "Tiny Systems On a Chip Computer Science" somewhat irreverently
proclaims the existence of tiny SOC systems, boards, chips, software, etc,
and their requisite Computer Science. Tiny SOC systems used to be
called embedded systems. Embedded systems, their associated
hardware, software and integrated development environments (IDE), were and
are still very expensive. But now, tiny SOCs run a full blown Unix/Linux
operating system, just like their older, bigger, hotter, noisier, fans
required, power hungry, expensive and common personal computers,
workstations, servers, clusters and virtualized environments. And the
Linux software that runs on them is free and open source. These tiny
SOC systems can no longer be dismissively called "embedded systems".
Today, setting up a full blown Linux Apache MySQL (or MariaDB) PHP (or
Perl, Python) (LAMP) server on a SOC is actually pretty easy.

I am not sure what sort of traffic load will overwhelm a tiny Raspberry
Pi Apache web server, but we are about to find out. When you guys
and gals crash this Pi, I will simply restart it again, put up some links
to a more robust clustered infrastructure, or create links to a hosted
service like Square-Space. There are new lessons to be learned by
both you and I. But trust me, with 45 years of history as my guide,
mind blowing speeds for tiny SOCs, or clusters of them, is just around the
corner. Remember, in today's computer world, in order to get ever
faster, the core integrated circuit and other components must continually
get smaller and closer together. Everything must inevitably move on
to the chip. The days of simply improving central processor (CPU)
performance by doubling or quadrupling CPU chip speed in the gigahertz
range appears to be stalled or over. So, in the search of the
required "closerness", three dimensional SOC fabrication and massive
component stacking awaits.

Einstein, and his speed of light limit, is still a problem for Electronic
Engineers (EE). In 1975, one of my first EE jobs involved the
manufacture, checkout and debug of supercomputer CPUs at Control Data
Corporation (CDC) right on the computer manufacturing floor. At that
time, our group was manufacturing the first few CDC Cyber 175 CPUs, the
$20,000,000 CPU design of Seymour Cray, at CDC's Arden Hills Minnesota
facility. Even then, Seymour Cray came to work every day to do
battle with the speed of light. These $20M CPUs were clocked at 20
megahertz (MHz) and were capable of 20 million floating point operations
per second (MFLOPS). Today, the Raspberry Pi's Broadcom SOC CPU at
700 Mhz is capable of 40 MFLOPS for less than $5, with the entire Pi SOC
based system costing $35. You might also take a look at
http://www.parallella.org. Tiny SOC systems are on the pathway to
"Its a Small, Small World, After All".

TinySOCCS will deal with matters surrounding computer platforms like the
tiny Raspberry Pi, Beagleboard, Arduino, Minnowboard, Parallella and the
many Tiny SOC Systems of the future. These tiny computer systems may not
have even been dreampt up, designed, tested, manufactured, debugged and
sold yet.

This site will never focus on the expensive. Any tiny SOC system costing
more than $100 will not even be considered. If a tiny SOC system cannot be
purchased by the real people, through common distribution channels, it
will not even be mentioned. If its software is not available for free,
than what is the point. If it will not run at least run Debian or Ubuntu,
it cannot be easily and consistently be used to teach Computer Science and
Engineering. If full source code is not available, then why waste your
time. If it only runs Windows, then who really cares.

The world needs more STEM - Scientists, Technicians, Engineers and
Mathematicians. These tiny systems can help us find, afford, educate and
support more of them. Future system administrators may have to configure
their data-centers with microscopes and tweezers, screwed to a wall, in a
battery powered coffee can, in a back yard shipping container, or on the
back wall of someones apartment closet. They can be run stand alone,
configured in IT/TS department like networks, or become parts of giant
data-center clusters. These tiny, inexpensive, and increasingly powerful
platforms, represent the first fruits of a new and very disruptive form
factor and technological era. Let the revolution begin, again!

This web server's software is currently running solely on a Raspberry Pi,
but no real or significant content has been added, yet. What little
there is was originally edited using Vi, of course. But now the
content and publishing has been handed over to BlueGriffon, a free WYSIWYG
web page development system, and of course FileZilla. My goal is to
teach, anyone who wishes to spend the time, how to build real, complex big
boy systems out of these ridiculously small and inexpensive
pieces. This "sophisticated simplicity" can scale to "complex
elegance" all to quickly. Just add money to purchase more and bigger
systems. Use your tiny knowledge as a repeatable pattern to build
the big.